The charter school sector in Ohio has always been a damn mess.
Even though EdChoice Vouchers are the primary school privatization scandal in Ohio today, it is good to be reminded—in Carol Burris’s new report on Ron Packard’s for-profit ACCEL charter schools—that our state still fails to protect the children enrolled and the public’s investment in charter schools. Ohio’s charter school sector has not improved despite that the state claims to have tightened oversight, despite that David Brennan sold off his White Hat empire before he died, and despite that a scandal about inflated enrollment forced the shut down of Bill Lager’s Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) three years ago.
What are some of the long term problems which plague Ohio’s charter sector and which the Legislature has chosen not to solve?
Charter School Sponsors Make a Lot of Money and Too Often Operate with Impunity
Burris reports that while some states hold a tight rein on charter school sponsorship and oversight, today in Ohio, there are 20 active nonprofit charter school sponsors. As an example, Burris describes the reach across Ohio of the St. Aloysius Orphanage in Cincinnati, an institution that has evolved over several generations from an orphanage to a mental health nonprofit. St. Aloysius Orphanage has figured out that in Ohio it is perfectly legal for a nonprofit institution to collect what is sometimes called “walking around money” by sponsoring charter schools, even if charter schools have nothing to do with the mission of the nonprofit. In other words, nonprofits can pad their own operating budgets by becoming Ohio charter schools sponsors. In Ohio, according to the Education Commission of the States, “Authorizers can retain up to 3% of the total amount of payments for operating expenses that the charter school receives (from the state) for administration fees.” In the 2020-2021 school year, according to the orphanage’s most recent annual report published by Charter School Specialists, St. Aloysius Orphanage collected administrative fees from sixty-two schools across Ohio for which the St. Aloysius Orphanage is supposedly responsible.
Except that, as Burris explains, St. Aloysius Orphanage, the legal nonprofit authorizer, has created a for-profit corporation, Charter School Specialists, to fulfill the responsibilities of a charter school sponsor. Burris explains that St. Aloysius Orphanage collected $3.6 million in 2019 for sponsoring charter schools and then turned over $2.3 million to Charter School Specialists for overseeing the schools. The problem is that by law, in Ohio, charter school sponsors must be nonprofits, but some Ohio charter schools have even referred to Charter School Specialists as their authorizer. As Burris points out, in 2017, the Plain Dealer reported that Charter School Specialists was discovered to be profiting from providing direct services to the schools and even operating as the treasurer of some of the schools St. Aloysius Orphanage sponsors—when the formal authorizer is specifically responsible by law for overseeing the schools’ operations under the law—a clear conflict of interest.
In Ohio For-Profit Charter Management Companies Continue To Get Away with Choosing the Members of the Nonprofit Boards that Supposedly Oversee the Work of the Management Company in their Particular School
Ohio requires that charter schools be sponsored by nonprofit organizations and monitored by the appointed members of each charter school board. The school board is the body which is responsible for hiring a management company (assuming the board wants to hire a management company) and overseeing the performance of any charter management company. In the early days of Ohio charter schools, David Brennan was notorious for hand picking the board members of charter schools that were were supposed to oversee the relationship of their school to his White Hat empire.
Carol Burris demonstrates that conflict of interest still persists in the schools managed by Ron Packard’s for-profit ACCEL Network, which took over many of Brennan’s schools when he became ill. Burris explains that ACCEL’s speciality is taking over struggling charter schools. “When ACCEL took over Buckeye prep in 2018, it operated the school as Buckeye for one year—before shutting it down to put another in its place. The for-profit needed to find a board to act as the nonprofit face for the new for-profit-run school.” That isn’t how it’s supposed to go. The whole idea is that a community of educators gets together and comes up with an idea for a nonprofit charter school. They propose a board and find a sponsor.
For-Profit Management Companies in Ohio Still Own Real Estate Affiliates and Lease—At Outrageous Rents—School Buildings They Own to the Nonprofit Charter Schools they Manage
Burris reports that Buckeye Community Hope Foundation, a nonprofit low-income housing nonprofit, which served as a sponsor in 2017 of 50 charter schools, also owned a for-profit corporation which owned a building that it rented to Buckeye Prep, a charter school for “more than $162,000 in building and furniture lease payments during 2017.” Later in 2020, after Buckeye Prep joined Ron Packard’s ACCEL network and found a new sponsor, St. Aloysius Orphanage, Buckeye Prep “paid ACCEL’s related real estate company $145,006 in rent, with ACCEL projecting a rent payment of $319,840 for the very same building in 2025. At that rate, ACCEL would recoup what they paid in six years—precisely the length of the school’s charter.” Burris explains: “Global School Properties, located at the same address as ACCEL and Pansophic in Virginia, is the real estate arm of ACCEL, which allows it to acquire properties and then basically rent their own buildings to themselves with public funds—through the schools they manage. ”
Sweeps Contracts Still Exist in Ohio
A sweeps contract is an arrangement by which a charter school board turns over virtually all of the state funds that support the school—with the exception of the 3 percent fee to the sponsor and the rent—to the charter management company. The management company is then expected to manage all of the school’s functions—usually without transparency even to the members of the school’s appointed board. Burris describes the for-profit ACCEL’s management during 2020 of Capital Collegiate Preparatory Academy in Columbus: “The management contract charges the charter school 15 percent of all revenue received, with a few exceptions. That is not where payments would end. A read of the management contract clarifies that ACCEL was in charge of, and would be compensated for all of the school’s day-to-day operations—from the curriculum to student records to all personnel services.”
The Overall Picture of Charter Schools in Ohio
The thread running through Burris’s Ohio story is the growing power and profiteering by Ron Packard’s ACCEL network: “In 2014, the online for-profit charter chain K12 Inc. announced a new yet-to-be-named company financed by Safanad Limited, a Dubai investment company. Pansophic Learning was launched later that year as the Safanad/K12 joint venture. The name of its American-based charter school company is ACCEL Schools. The CEO of both Pansophic and ACCEL is Ron Packard, formerly of K12 Inc….. ACCEL’s primary strategy is to pluck schools from established for-profit chains that failed or are folding, including Mosaica, White Hat Management, and I CAN Schools. With no shortage of failing charter schools to buy, ACCEL’s growth has been fast paced. It now manages 73 charter schools (brick and mortar or online) in Arizona, California, Colorado, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Washington, and it is attempting to open schools in West Virginia… ACCEL’s largest portfolio is in Ohio. Forty-six schools list ACCEL as their operator. However, we also found an additional 17 schools run by a superintendent with an ACCEL email address, all but two under the Constellation Schools brand. And in 2018, ACCEL bought out White Hat’s failing online charter school, OHDELA, resulting in a total of 64 schools in that state.”
Clearly, the Ohio Legislature has been unwilling, whether because of ideology or due to investments by lobbyists, to oversee the charter school sector to protect the children enrolled and the taxpayers from abuses by unscrupulous charter school operators and authorizers.
I encourage you to read all the way to the end of Burris’s critique to learn about one instance when people originally recruited by ACCEL—because they would be friendly to ACCEL— to form the board of directors of Buckeye Prep (now called Capital Collegiate Preparatory Academy) realized the school was paying more attention to profits than to the well being of its students. Board members woke up and led the board to hire Tisha Brady “to serve as a compliance officer to get a better understanding of the school’s day-to-day operations.” In this one instance, the charter school board did its job: “Brady, a former lobbyist for School Choice Ohio and longtime supporter of charter schools” told Carol Burris: “This is simply a cash grab using disadvantaged students as ATMs to launder funds into the pockets of a private corporation.” Subsequently, two of Capital Collegiate Preparatory Academy’s board members resigned—board president Leslie Eaves and board member, Rhonda Whitfield.
But the story doesn’t have a happy ending: “The school’s website now lists only four board members, still including Whitfield, who is gone—a violation of law that requires five board members.” In a new seventh grade added this year, “one teacher teaches all subjects on a rotating basis and out of certification. But, those seventh-graders, no matter how poorly prepared, increased the head count, which in turn increased ACCEL’s fees for both rent and management… And so, it will continue until the school’s charter is up in 2025.”
Burris concludes: “Right now, nearly half of all charter schools in Ohio are run by for-profits. Most of these charter schools are located in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States.” And it turns out that the Ohio Department of Education awarded half of all the money granted to Ohio in a 2015 federal Charter Schools Program Grant to charter schools that were part of Ron Packard’s ACCEL network.
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